


Cold Extremities

by babyredpanda



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 19:02:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5713555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/babyredpanda/pseuds/babyredpanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Loki spends more and more time on Earth with his husband, his body slowly starts to change, making him slightly more human everyday. Tony finds it quite funny. Loki doesn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Extremities

In an ultimate moan, Loki finally allowed his extatic, arched body to lay on the silk sea of their bed. A panting Tony soon rolled over, his hand reaching out for his lover’s and gently caressing the strangely cold mounts of his palm. Both trying to catch their runaway breath, they glanced at each other with a content, tender smile.

Tony took a second of this blessed instant to aknowledge how insanely beautiful his husband looked - pale skin covered in a cloak of shivers, delicate lines of sweet, sweet flesh, marked here and there with the purple memory of his lips, tongue and teeth. 

And then there were the pale scars that had burned in his skin the times when they still were enemies. He bit his lower lip. Strangely good remembrances, they were. Oh, he recalled the day he got him in Stuttgart, and the one he offered him a drink, and- His smile widened, as he wrapped both arms around his thin waist. 

Loki, having well noticed his human’s worshipful gaze, sighed in weary bliss and buried his chilly nose in the warm valley of Tony’s shoulder. The newly appointed heat provider gasped in suprise.

“Hm, Loki ?” he murmured.  
“What ?” Loki managed to mutter against his skin, eyes already closed.  
“This is your human form, right ?”  
“Technically, my asgardian form. Why ?”  
“You’re freezing in a very jötun way. Well, your nose, hands and-” His fingers slid on the slight curves of his companion’s legs, following the road to his toes. “-feet are freezing in a very jötun way. Are you ill ?”  
“I shall not think so”, Loki answered with a touch of embarrassment. “I… I simply am adapting to my earthly condition.”  
“What do you mean ?” the relieved but still curious scientist asked.  
Loki pursed his lips and remained silent for a few seconds, visibly hesitant.  
“While immortal, my body is not immune to certain -neglectable- changes.”  
“You’re mutating, is that what you’re saying ?” Tony enquired, merely containing a laugh.  
“Adapting.” Loki growled, lightly slapping his husband’s arm.  
“Adapting ?”  
“Some minor human weaknesses are slowly… ‘sinking in’.”  
“Minor human weaknesses, huh ?” Tony smiled.  
“Why, yes ! Cold extremities are far from being an alarming condition, especially in winter !”

The somewhat irritated god pointed at the wide and diaphanous window that covered most of the bedroom walls. Twenty floors below, covered in a thin layer of albescent snow, streets were flooded with late -or early- workers. Hidden behind woolen scarves and thick coats, they of course ignored Loki’s gaze upon them, but still graciously proved his point by blowing hot air into their cold hands, then plunging them swiftly in the warmth of their pockets.

Tony, though trying really hard to keep a straight face, burst out of laughter.  
“I’m obviously not the one feeling alarmed here, darling”, he finally teased, eyes still glowing with amusement.  
“Shut it”, Loki grumbled while hiding under the blanket.  
“I hope this minor human weakness doesn’t extend to a certain other extremity…”  
“I said, shut it !”  
“C'mon, Lokes… You’re the Trickster, you’re supposed to like jokes. Hey, that rhymed!” Tony jested, trying to catch his lover’s eye.

But Loki remained still and silent, again. The scientist rolled his eyes and let out a sigh. Sulky Loki was back, and obviously not willing to leave anytime soon.  
“Are you pretending to be asleep again?”  
Indeed he was. Stupid stubborn goat.  
“Good night then”, he mumped, laying a subtle kiss on his temple, before rolling on his side.

He laid awake for a whole hour, squirming in his sheets while trying to find a comfortable position. The thing was, he never felt comfortable near a cold Loki. Oh, cold jötun body, cold asgardian extremities, those could never bother him. But a cold spirit, that he feared greatly. He always thought the day his husband would definitely stop laughing would either be the day he would at last unfold all the little memories and pains and fears that he, Tony, still knew nothing about, or the day everything would stop. Both situations were equally terrifying, in their own way.  
And when Anthony Stark was scared, he did the only sensible thing to do, really.  
He cracked a joke.

Of course fright was not the only reason why he got out of bed in the middle of the night - Loki’s feet and hands were still glacial, and, he had to confess, he enjoyed teasing him far too much.  
He silently reached his drawer and retrieved two pairs of warm, bright colored socks. Then he let out a discreet evil laugh, adding a third pair to his collection before going back to bed.

He first made sure Loki was really, deeply sleeping, by playing with his carefully brushed locks - Loki hated it and certainly would have reacted if he had been awake. Which he obviously was not.  
Tony took a moment to admire his outrageously innocent face, then cautiously lifted the sheets and blankets, before shifting towards the end of the bed. Slowly, he plunged his husband’s feet in a first pair of socks.  
Loki’s hands soon found the exact same fate.  
And then, thoughtful and caring as always, Tony made sure the most important extremity of his god’s celestial anatomy was provided with equal protection.  
The only sock remaining was negligently abandoned on the floor, as Tony saved this precious vision into his phone and drew the sheets back onto Loki’s resting body.  
He knew he would probably regret this.  
But Loki had to learn how to take a joke, did he not?

***

The lab was overflowing with flying holographic screens and erratic formulas. At six in the morning, after two full hours of peaceful sleep, Tony was always dangeroulsy creative. He was also very aware that a punch in the face from a half-sleepy  - and therefore quite impulsive - Loki could disfigure him forever. Therefore, his palace of inventiveness seemed the perfect place to be, while he awaited for his lover’s awakening.

“TONYYYYYY !”  
“Pray the Lord and boil the oil, Jarvis, the Beast is coming”, Tony whispered.  
“May I advise you to adopt a slightly more repentant attitude,  Sir?”  
“You may, but I won’t listen.”  
“Anthony Edward Stark, I will cut you open with your own snatched teeth !” Loki growled as he teleported himself in the room.  
“I believe that’s the sexiest thing you’ve said to me since last night”, Tony smiled, though raising an eyebrow at the sight of his companion’s blue skin and bloody eyes.

Loki only took his jötun form when he was really, really angry.

“Will you shut up ?!” the indeed really angry god screamed. “Haven’t I made it clear yesterday that I was not in the mood for your grotesque sense of humour ?!”  
“You made nothing clear, Loki: you told me to shut it -as you just did again- and you litterally turned your back on me”, Tony calmly replied, despite a rising irritation.  
“As 'leave me alone’ requests go, it was as clear as it could get”, Loki scolded, dangeroulsy approaching.  
“And that’s the problem, Loki ! I don’t wanna leave you alone ! I’m your husband for God’s sake ! If you childishly sulk in a corner, everytime I rag a bit, how the hell am I supposed to know what’s wrong ?”  
“Childishly ?! I am acting childishly ?! Am I the one running around covering people’s genitals with socks ?!”  
“First, I wasn’t running. Second, maybe I didn’t do it just for fun - okay I did. And it was. Both. Fun and childish”, he finally admitted in a sigh. “So. Now that I’ve aknowledged behaving like a 6 year-old and that you’ve properly overreacted, maybe we could put aside our puerile selves and have an adult conversation ?”

Loki gratified him with a deathly gaze, jaw tense and arms crossed.  
“Show me your phone”, he eventually requested.  
“My phone?”  
“Your phone, yes, show it to me.”  
“Why ? Loki, did you listen to me ? I want us to talk. You used to laugh at my stupid jokes. Why’d you stop ?” Tony asked, openly worried, this time.  
“Show me your phone and I will tell you.”

The scientist sighed and silently shook his head, but complied. He picked up the requested item from his pocket and yielded it to his husband. Loki quickly tightened his long and icy fingers around it, causing a thin layer of frost to form on the metallic case. 

“You changed your password”, he noticed.  
“Your name was too obvious”, Tony faintly smiled. “I translated its meaning in Japanese, then in Russian, then in Hungarian, French, and Japanese again. Quite a funny process.”  
“Just show me your pictures”, Loki coldly answered, handing the phone back to its owner.  
“You could’ve started there… And I suppose I’m still not allowed to know why on Earth you want to see my pi-”

He frowned. A gasp of comprehension escaped his lips as he absentmindedly warmed up the incriminated device in his palm.  
“You want to know if I took a picture of you with those socks on”, he gently murmured. “Right ?”  
“Did you ?” Loki asked in a chilly voice.  
“I did”, Tony confessed.  
"You will erase it now.”  
“I won’t show it to anybody!” he protested, before frowing again. “Loki, please don’t tell me you’re afraid that I will use it to publicly mock you”, he murmured, in shock.  
"Of course not!” Loki grunted. “I don’t care about the public, the people, the others. They’re nothing to me.”  
“So what ?”

Loki bit his inner lip and looked away. His foot nervously beat the ground as he led a silent but harsh debate with his own stubborn self.  
“So you. You are not nothing to me”, he finally breathed through his teeth.  
Tony remained still for a moment, confused, then sighed and gently rejoined his husband, soflty wrapping both hands around his. 

"Loki. Please. I can’t read minds. Just let it all out already. Please.”  
His chocolate irises patiently seeked the two crimson buds that desperatly tried to avoid him. Loki jolted his head and looked down in shame.

“I… I believe it is the way you look at me, sometimes”, he ultimately spoke in a whisper. “There is such adoration in your eyes. I cannot pretend I never desired such worship, but now that you are giving it to me so lovingly… I suppose I fear that every little weakness of mine is a potential threat to your love for me. I want to be your golden god, I want to give you what you seem to yearn for so often when our eyes meet. I do try my best, I swear to you. But there are things that I simply cannot control. And this very first weakness leads to so many others that I desperately try to hide from you. But how can I hide, when even my own body betrays me, as it becomes more and more human, less and less worthy of your adoration? When you noticed, yesterday, when you teased me, I felt so, so unworthy -again. And this morning, I just… I assumed that, if you could so easily ridicule the body that you used to contemplate so religiously, you might simply never look at me this way again… Maybe never cherish me as much ag-” 

Ashamed and terrified, Loki broke in miserable tears. He immediately buried them, with his entire face, in his shaking hands, which he first had feverishly extracted from his companion’s grip.  
“Loki…” Tony swished, eyes wide and watery. “You stupid little snowflake…”  
He delicately tip-toed to reach his husband’s hands, removing them slowly from his now purple visage. He cupped his cheeks with his own palms and gazed directly into his teary eyes.

“I don’t seek any godly golden perfection in you, Loki; I am already outrageously happy with the earthly flawed perfection I found in the love we share, in every single moment we spend together, even when we fight, even when we cry. That, and that only, is what you see when I 'look at you this way’. My blessed and crazy happiness.” He tenderly smiled, his thumbs lightly caressing the cold ark of his little giant’s cheekbones. “I don’t want you to think of yourself as a monument, a piece of art that any little change can alter irremediably to the eye of its owner. And if I ever led you to think this way… Please, forgive me.”

He firmly closed his warm arms around his partner’s torso, hugging him as tighlty as he could, despite their problematic height difference.  
“Please don’t cry everytime I tease you. I love teasing you too much, and that would make me a monster”, he finally added in a playful grimace. 

Loki, who had remained silent, overwhelmed with the unbelievable truth, let out a nervous laugh.  
"You’re already a monster, those socks itched horribly”, he jested in a murmur, his voice still slightly hoarse.  
Tony laughed in relief and lovingly pulled him closer, making him lean over in a somewhat laborious attempt to obtain a kiss. 

"Careful”, Loki smiled. “I am cold everywhere now.”  
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find a way to warm you up…”  
“I still want this picture deleted.”  
“It’s a memory!”  
“Of me looking ridiculous?”  
“Of you looking cute as hell!”  
“Liar.”  
“We’ll negociate later, if you don’t mind…”  
“What exactly are you doing with your hands?”  
“Told you: warming you up.”

FIN


End file.
